MS Paint Tools and Functions

Hello MS Paint Lovers, Welcome to mspainttutorial.blogspot.com. This is a detailed article and tutorial about MS Paint Tools and Functions. We have covered all options and functionalities with examples. So go through this article thoroughly for an in depth understanding about Microsoft Paint Tools and Techniques.

If you want to know the history of MS Paint and What is MS Paint? Then click here.

In this article we shall focus on Microsoft Paint Version 6.1 which comes with Windows 7 operating system.

Below is a PDF reader as well. If you want to download the PDF please click here.

Now let's start...

How to launch MS Paint?

Well! There are 2 popular ways to launch MS Paint. Method 1: On Window 7 operating system, click on the Start Button → then click on All Programs → then click on Accessories → and then finally click on Paint. Refer to the images below:

MS Paint Screen Parts

MS Paint Screen Parts consists of 4 main sections. They are Quick Access Toolbar, Ribbon with Tabs, Drawing Area and Status Bar.

Quick Access Toolbar

The left side of the Quick Access Toolbar usually consists of Save, Undo and Redo Buttons. The right side of the Quick Access Toolbar has Minimize, Restore/Mazimize and Close buttons.

Drawing Area

The drawing area is the place where you can draw. It is facilitated with the horizontal and vertical scrollbars. The size of the drawing area is customizable as per your requirement.

Status Bar

The left most part of the status bar shows the X and Y Co-ordinate position of the cursor as you move it in the drawing area. Immidetaly nest to that the siz of the drawing area is shown in pixels. And at the right most part of the status bar you can find the Zoom In and Zoom Out controls.

Ribbon - File menu

The file menu has options such as New, Open, Save, Save as, Print etc as shown in the image below. You could also see the list of recent files.

Home Tab

The home tab has clipboard options, image options, shapes and color panel as below:

Clipboard

The clipboard has options such as cut, copy, paste and paste from. Among these the paste from oprion allows you to copy the content of another image file or mspaint file into the current file.

Image Tools

Under the image section you could find options crop tool, selection tools, image resize and image rotation tools. Paint offers 2 selection tools: 1) Rectangular selection tool 2) Free-form selection tool. Further you have options to create opaque and transparent selections. You also have an option to invert the selection.

In paint you can filp the selected area and objects horizontally and vertically. As far as the image rotation options are concerened you can only rotate selected area or objects in 90 degree increments.

MsPaint Tools

MsPaint offers pencil, paint bucket, text, eraser, color picker, magnifier and brush tools. Under the brushs you can select other modifiers such as calligraphy brush 1, calligraphy brush 2, airbrush, oil brush, crayon, marker, natural pencil and water color brush.

The thickness of the pencil and brushes can be increased using the keyboard shortcut: CTRL+(+) on the numeric keypad. Similarly you can decrease the size using he keyboard shortcut: CTRL+(-) on the numeric keypad.

Shapes

This section consists of predefined shapes, outline, fill and line width options. MsPaint version which is  available in windows 7 and later versions have more pre-defined shapes. Among these line, curve, oval, rectangle, polygon etc are available in all versions of mspaint.

Outline and Fill Properties

The outline and fill properties are: No outline, Solid color, Crayon, Marker, Oil, Natural pencil and Watercolor. Fill properties are not available for line and cure tools. For reset other shapes both outline and fill properties are available.

Line width

By default there are 3 line widths but further you can increase or decrease the line width by pressing the keyboard shortcuts CTRL+(+) or CTRL+(-) on the numeric keypad.

Color panel

In the color panel can select both color 1(foreground color) and color 2(background color). Then you have a set of default colors.

Color Editor

You can use color editor to pick a specific color of your choice. The color editor can be launced by clicking on edit colors button.

Further you can edit existing drawing in Paint 3D by clicking on edit with Paint 3D button. Please note that this option is available for windows 10 and later versions of windows.

I HOPE THAT THIS ARTICLE PROVIDES YOU AN INTRODUCTION TO MSPAINT TOOLS AND FUNCTIONS. Please share your thoughts in the comments. Also let us know about your mspaint requirements. We can create articles and tutorials based on your queries.